I have long had issues with personality tests. In fact ever since I learned about how they were being used in organizations to make hiring decisions (along with hand-writing analysis) back when I was in graduate school, I found the whole idea preposterous. Today, I still find them inherently restrictive, because they box people in to set of definitions based on gross generalizations, which makes them about as effective and applicable as horoscopes.
Think about it. What if they’re wrong?
For those people who are believers in the utility of these tests, they have to know that the results can not be right one hundred percent of the time. That, in and of itself, is intrinsically risky. In addition, there is no way to measure the absolute effectiveness of these tools because it is impossible to know how many candidates were turned away based on scores who may very well have proved to be valuable employees, and potentially even invaluable. Lastly and perhaps the most important, is that these instruments don’t test facts. They test subjective knowledge which is variable by day and cognitive in nature. So what you are getting by administering these tests is what people think and feel at any given moment. They do not show you what someone can do, which matters more than anything when it comes to working. An audition would be better.
Frankly, a good HR and management team should not need to rely on an impersonal and organizationally irrelevant test to help them decide what and who is right for their organization. They should know.
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
There is a lot of confusion about training employees when it comes to deciding whether it’s better to use an academic approach like those used in colleges and universities, or a work-based model that focuses on practical and applied learning.
The answer is actually very easy. To learn about theories and frameworks and history, go to school, sit in a classroom and learn about things, expand your mind and devour the knowledge. But at work, we need to get things done. So when people need to learn how to do the work required in their jobs, an analytical approach to teaching and learning won’t work. In order for employees to build the right skills that will in turn build the business and fortify the organization, companies need to train their employees in the context of what they need to know and do in order to successfully execution the function of their roles.
Here’s a tip:
Start at the end and work backward, meaning that you should define clearly and explicitly first what they need to be able to do by the end of the training, and then back the “lesson” into that end result.
It never fails. Ted.com brings the best ideas forward. Cogent. Smart. Insightful and true. I’m consistently impressed with the fresh perspectives they present as they deviate away from the outdated, the ineffective and overly rehearsed business babble that has inundated us for years. This time Barry Schwartz talks about why and how incentives and rules don’t work despite the fact that they are, and continue to be, the most commonly employed strategies in organizational life today. I just loved it!
It cracks me up. But it’s baffling too. Why does everyone hate training so much? Is learning really so bad? You wouldn’t think so, not when you consider the amount of money that people spend on classes and lessons to learn how to do things. So what has gone wrong in corporate and organizational learning?
I think it comes down to one very simple thing that for some reason has thus far eluded the world of work. And that is, people want to learn to do, not learn to know. Knowing is boring. Cognition for most is simply not enough. People want to be engaged, active and challenged. So until we see a fundamental shift in training attitudes, our employees will want to jump off a cliff too if they are faced with having to attend a workshop or seminar that adheres to traditional tenets of learning such as classroom formats and text-driven teaching.
This is not new, but it is important. Ben Franklin actually had it right way back in the day when he said,
Tell me and I forget.
Teach me and I remember.
Involve me and I learn.
Frankly, I don’t know what it is going to take. If a commercial airing during the Superbowl couldn’t get the message out, I don’t know what will.
I recently started thinking about how diverse we are, or are not, in the workplace. Granted, it’s better than it used to be, but it still seems that like-groups remain clustered, a tendency that prevents true integration from being attained. Factions exist and competition continues to separate us. But yet, sometimes I think that so much time and effort is spent analyzing demographics and trying to understand “why” we reject differences that in some way it has retarded our ability to move forward in the first place.
Like anything warranting change, the first step toward heading in the right direction is awareness. So here is a fun thing you can do with your employees to start the conversation and begin to evaluate how well you incorporate differences into your business and practices.
Get a bunch of colored marbles and enough small boxes or bowls for each person to have two.
Assign each color a demographic, e.g. each gender, selected races, age groups, disabled, etc…
Select the marbles that best represent your personal demographics, e.g., color, gender, marital status, ethnicity, etc… and set them aside in one of the boxes or bowls.
Have each person make a list of people with whom they spend the most time and describe the demographic attributes of those individuals, e.g. male, female, color, sexual orientation, marital status, etc…
Go down the list one at a time and fill the box with the marbles whose colors represent the different qualities of the individuals written on the list.
Evaluate yourself on how well you incorporate people outside your “likeness” circle.
Discuss your findings with the group and talk about any barriers or parameters that need to be moved or adjusted which may be holding your business back.
Anyone who knows us (at Krysalis) knows we have a lot to say about PowerPoint. In fact, what PowerPoint has become is such a peeve of ours that we often speak at, or teach companies how to structure, design and deliver better presentations. The reason we are so hung up on PowerPoint’s flaws is the same reason the rest of the world is. People hate it. Or more specifically, they hate being bored to tears. If you work, chances are you’ve probably had to endure a slideshow or two that is so poorly done, it hurts. But on the other hand, presenters love it. Why is that? How can there be such an inherent contradiction on both sides of the slides?
Well for starters, it’s not PowerPoint that is the problem. It’s the people using it. So to bring presenters and audiences closer together, we propose a few simple tricks to fix what’s wrong with the way presentations are delivered on screen today.
We call them “PowerPointers” and they encourage the use of:
Consistencyin structure and patterns
Colors and Shapes
Graphs and Charts
Frameworks and Images
Motionand Sound
But most of all, we stress that every decision must be strategically linked to the message and purpose of the presentation. For example, it is not OK to splash colors all over the place in order to be “colorful.” Instead, they should be used in a conscious and deliberate way to communicate or highlight key points.
Needless to say, when I received this video, you can imagine the fun we had to see how things can turn out if you do exactly what we recommended without having a strategy behind it. In a word?… or three? It’s a mess.
For a long, long time I’ve been arguing that differences in the way people learn, see and think is a good thing despite the fact that the mainstream would have those who don’t process information in a traditional and linear way diagnosed with any number of “defects.”
Until now information has typically been delivered as text - black letters on white paper. And not very creatively at that, I might add. Letter-by-letter, line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph, page-by-page, no color, no movement, no sound, no design, no patterns, nothing. It’s just not very interesting to many people and to some it’s outright boring. The point being that it all depends on a person’s brain. I had one parent with an extremely academic, engineering and financial mind and another who could paint, draw and sculpt the most incredible beauty imaginable. Nothing was wrong with either one of them. They were equally talented. Just different. Meanwhile, I landed somewhere in the middle with dyslexia and a strong belief that the more you diversify and expand the way you communicate, the more broadly appealing and inclusive the message.
Then technology came along and suddenly, reading is not the same. Tradition is out the window along with linear thinking. Now, we watch videos and read articles. Written words are more colorful, graphic and engaging. Even the “pages” themselves are lighter and brighter and more apt to stimulate a brain who likes that kind of presentation over a piece of white paper with black letters on it.
Then Dan Pink came along and wrote a bestseller called “A Whole New Mind,” which is about the movement toward right-brain thinking and how a shift in the value of creativity over logic will change the way we work, live and learn. At last, I have a cohort with whom I completely agree. And finally, I think there will be space for everyone thanks to the information age.
I’ve been making the same argument for a long, long time. And that is that training can easily be a waste of time and a waste of money - and I say this as a trainer. Let’s face it, we are the first to go when budgets get cut. Well, it’s no wonder! One of the bigger and more divergent trends in training has taken the concept of “off-sites” to a whole new level by shipping employees to all corners of the earth (usually first class) to learn new things. But what these things actually have to do with work and contribute to a business’s culture, growth and bottom line is tenuous at best. Some argue that these programs help retain workers in general, and top talent specifically. Maybe so. But I say there are far more cost effective, strategic, sound, business-savvy, inclusive ways to retain employees without making others feel as if they don’t measure up enough to be selected to play in a company’s “reindeer games.” It’s exclusive. And “big picture?” It can’t be good for moral across the larger organization.
About a year ago, I wrote about feeling similarly conflicted when it came to the teambuilding bandwagon onto which so much of corporate America has jumped. It’s all too often that neither teambuilding nor training programs work because the objectives themselves are too far removed from business results. It makes no sense. Training is not a luxury; it’s a necessity that shouldn’t be eliminated in the same way that people cut back on vacations during belt-tightening times. What it should be is not cost prohibitive, but ongoing and highly relevant to the immediate, short and long-term needs of the business.
Well it seems I’m in good company. Douglas MacMillan also wrote about this recently as a questionable trend in Business Week. He’s not convinced, nor am I that ROI is anywhere to be found on these ”training trips” that actually train people to do very little that pertains to work, if anything at all.
Donna 
